Two Critical Phases of Growth

Jeff Cornwall, over at the Entrepreneurial Mind, shares this story from StartupJournal about there being two critical phases of entrepreneurial growth:

1. The first is aligning your business to the market properly before you even open the doors. This is the process of opportunity assessment.
2. The second critical point is when the business hits its growth phase.

According to Jeff, "During growth, both the business and the entrepreneur have to go through transitions. For the business, the entrepreneur has to build systems and processes that can handle processes that the entrepreneur managed himself when the business was smaller. And that leads to the second transition. As the entrepreneur builds more and more of the day-to-day details into systems and delegates responsibility to the expanding team, his job must change. As seen in the case at StartupJournal, the transition from being mostly a "doer" into becoming a "real CEO" can be one of the biggest challenges an entrepreneur can face."

BOTTOMLINE: In the growth phase, the entrepreneur/CEO must make the transition (To use a Gerber phrase) from working "in" the business - to working ON the business." That means building processes that others can be accountable for as the business grows. Until now, there's only been disconnected "systems" to help growing organizations to approach this in a systematic fashion.

Six Disciplines is a systematic, repeatable and cyclical business-building process, that includes practical software systems enabling top-performing organizations to document and improve processes, tying together the core business fundamentals (strategy, planning, measurement, execution, learning and leadership) ith measures to monitor change and improvement. Six Disciplines Leadership Centers provide the on-going coaching and strategic advisory services that CEOs and their organization's need during this critical business growth phase.